28 Nov 06
Some of the people we speak to have zero income. Many survive by trading the fruit they grow for some rice. In the remote Wild West of China, homes for the lucky ones can best be described as scruffy mud, concrete or brick boxes about the size of one-car garages. Less fortunate citizens sleep in tents, caves, huts, containers... any shelter they can blag for themselves. Some work day and night, so they have no need for a place called home. Women risk their lives sweeping the dust off the busy road surfaces, while ignoring the mountains of plastic, cardboard and paper litter. Others bash trees with their brooms, then sweep up the leaves and burn them in small roadside fires. More air pollution? Just what China needs.
Meanwhile, the toilets - even those in posh, newly built motorway service areas - are NEVER cleaned and therefore capable of starting a new plague. The motorways are as mad as the standards of hygiene. Expensive toll booths every few minutes. Uneven surfaces that make you grateful you've got an armour plate on the underside of your E-Class. Major repair and construction works with no advance warning or cones. Live lanes with workers standing in them, vehicles parked in them or - my nightmare-come-true scenario- vans and trucks going the wrong way, straight towards you.
Another massive and unexplained danger is that the driving surfaces on Chinese motorways slicing through countryside and desert are often raised by about 20ft above the natural terrain, which means that motorists and truckers are effectively balancing on high-speed shelves. Lose your concentration on a Western motorway and you might end up in a field. Make the same mistake in China and you nosedive into the ground from a great height.
The Silk Road isn't silky, the bit of the Great Wall I see isn't that great and Urumqi , the remotest city in the world in terms of distance from sea water, somehow doesn't feel very remote, because as Western China goes this is a boomtown. The Flaming Mountains aren't even smouldering. And at the end of my journey in Lanzhou, guess what? The Yellow River is more of a shitty greeny brown colour.
I've driven in more than 60 lands and can't think of one that's more squalid than China. It's a filthy place. No question, the People's Republic is the dirtiest country I've ever been to.
Loved it. Absolutely loved it.
